Posts Tagged ‘bernard tschumi’

Quite frankly, at this point I’m not sure if Ingmar Bergman, who, according to Woody Allen, is “probably the greatest film artist, all things considered, since the invention of the motion picture camera,” is actually that great of a study for the relationship between film and architecture. Thus, it may be helpful to discuss the idea of a project as it relates to both film and architecture.

This movie, Jungfrukällan, as it was called in its native Swedish, won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. It is a story about the rape of a young girl in medieval Scandinavia and its repercussions. It is one of Bergman’s most important films in his oeuvre of 50-some films over 40-odd years and sealed his status as one of the world’s most important directors when it was released in 1960, on the heels of Smiles of a Summer Night, The Seventh Seal, and Wild Strawberries.

Bergman’s films are about the issues of love, death, religion and God. They are movies about morality and existence; and they are profound, beautiful meditations upon those subjects. The problem is: I’m not sure that architecture can be about those things, and therefore I’m not sure whether or not Bergman belongs in any study of the intersection between architecture and film.

Though the relationship between film and architecture has been made implicit since at least as far back as Le Corbusier’s film, L’architecture d’Aujourd’hui, in 1927 (bear in mind that the motion picture was invented around 1895 by the Lumiere brothers), it maybe worth positing that the fundamental point of intersection between these two fields is upon the meta-representational idea of media. Insofar as film can be conceived of and interpreted as an examination and rumination upon the very nature of perception, thus it can be extrapolated to also relate to an architecture that is also concerned with the project of perception.

Thus, it is worth noting at this point that the idea of an architecture concerned with perception may be inextricably linked to the idea of criticality. Of course, now we’re going to have to define what I mean when I say perception, but to exhaust my quota for the usage of a particular prefix, I would say that we are interested in the mechanics of perception, or the apparatus of perception, i.e., meta-perception. This is specifically different from a phenomological or performative definition of perception, which is not to say that either is invalid.

At the moment that cinema was invented it was part of a wave of technological innovation at the beginning of the 20th century that changed the way we conceive of space—the airplane, automobile, Einstein’s general and special theories of relativity, quantum mechanics, even the bicycle, were all invented nearly coincidentally. This superceded the single-point perspective conception of space as inherited since the Renaissance, and certain architects, most notably Le Corbusier, Rem Koolhaas, Bernard Tschumi, and Diller & Scofidio made a number of important investigative projects into the nature of perception using the idea of cinema as medium as a part of their work.

Things may be changing, however, and certain filmmakers like Michael Haneke (the image above is the opening shot to his movie Caché) are starting to posit a new conceptual viewpoint—that of surveillance, or a collective, anonymous presence (here is a great article about Haneke). This is radically different from the idea of singularity inherent to both the Renaissance idea of perspective and the modern, cinematic one—and like any important innovation in regards to perception, it carries huge political ramifications. With political ideas comes ideas of organization, and with organization comes architecture.

Nearly as soon as cinema was invented were there theoreticians who wrote about the expansive possibilities of film to change the way we document and understand architecture. In fact, Modern architecture can be seen as an attempt to reconcile the possibilities of technology with the way we build. Walter “the J is like a Y” Benjamin, Le “Little Devil” Corbusier, Aldo “Crayola” Rossi, Bernard “Ah-” Tschumi, and Rem “Cool-Hizzy” Koolhaas, just to name a few, have all famously used film to advance ideas about architecture and urbanism.

Cinema is the dominant medium of today (though that may be changing), and this is no small potatoes. There have only been a few changes in dominant media since the dawn of history; first was language and oration, the Renaissance gave birth to perspective and thus monocularcentric text and image, and then the twentieth century gave us relativity and motion. Eisenman would call these moments of change shifts: from theocentric to anthropocentric to technocentric; Marshall McLuhan would say they were sensual-spatial: from aural to visual to electro-acoustic.

Dziga Vertov was one of the first to experiment with the extreme technical possibilities of film. Vertov uses slow-motion, fast-motion, jump-cuts, extreme close-ups, double-exposure, freeze-frames, Dutch-angles and tracking shots to document the day in the life of a Russian city. This film is unabashedly ambitious in its attempt to document space and urbanity free from the tethers of literature.

Rem Koolhaas as the l’homme d’architecture par example du jour (that’s French for “dude be the man right now”) presents an interesting case for a study of the intersection between film and architecture. Though his contemporary Bernard Tschumi more explicitly draws on film as a possible source of architectural inspiration (see The Manhattan Transcripts, Architecture & Disjunction), Remment Koolhaas actually was a screenwriter before he became an architect (he wrote, among other things, soft-core porn scripts for Russ Meyer–which explains some of the pages in his book, Content). Though it’s hard to say anything specific about Rem, which has a lot to do with the way OMA runs, it nevertheless may be interesting to use him to understand the contemporary condition. For if we are to assume the canon of critical architecture, then we could use Rem to theorize a paradigmatic shift from criticality to post. The moment that this occurred, if I were to try and pin it down Charles Jencks-style, would have to be around 1997 with the appearance of Frank Gehry’s Bilbao. But Gehry himself, who was born Ephraim Owen Goldstein in Toronto, Canada, never was a player in architecture beforehand—he was building parking garages in California before Bilbao. Rem, then, could be the architect that represents the shift from a critical paradigm to a projective or post-critical paradigm (see Jussieu vs. Porto). And if we grant him that, then he is in rare company indeed. For before Rem, James Stirling was the man sitting on top of the fulcrum that swung from Modern to Post-Modern (see Leicester vs. Stuttgart), and before him Le Corbusier was the man that spanned pre-Modern to Modern.

But of course, this is all predicated on the idea that we accept criticality as a continually valid project for architecture, and not a distinctly Modern-with-a-capital M and Western invention. For criticality may be fatally linked to Hegel and the distinctly twentieth century notion of a canon, to say nothing of the contemporary challenge that Asia presents to criticality (more on that later). It also may be interesting to note that those three Fulcrum Men: Corb, Stirling, and Rem, came to architecture after initial careers in other fields. Le Corbusier was a painter and never had a formal architectural education, James Stirling went to art school and served in the military before attending Liverpool University (as someone who was trained as a painter myself, I love pointing out other architects who were also painters), and Rem wrote porno screenplays before going to the AA in London. However, this makes sense if we understand that any creative act is as equally destructive as it is creative (one could use the laws of thermodynamics as an analogy). It seems to point to the idea that there is nothing so dangerous to the status-quo as an artist bent on destruction. Which is why I’m a lifetime member of the NRA.